King Alfred the Great

849 – 899 · Generation I · King of Wessex and of the Anglo-Saxons (r. 871–899) · House of Wessex

Alfred the Great was born at the royal estate of Wantage, then in Berkshire, in 849 according to his biographer Asser. His father was Æthelwulf, King of Wessex, his mother was Osburh, and with four older brothers he can have seemed an unlikely king. Asser tells how his mother offered a book of English poetry to whichever of her sons could first learn it by heart, and how Alfred won it, though he could not yet read. As a small boy he was sent to Rome in 853 and was later taken there again by his father. Three of his brothers reigned in turn before him, an arrangement meant to keep the throne out of the hands of boys while Viking raids grew worse.

By the time Alfred came of age the Great Heathen Army had landed in England, and within a few years Northumbria, East Anglia and much of Mercia had fallen. In 868 he fought beside his brother King Æthelred and in the same year married Ealhswith, a Mercian noblewoman descended from Mercian kings through her mother. When the Danes invaded Wessex at the end of 870 a series of battles followed, including a victory at Ashdown in January 871. Æthelred died that April, and Alfred, aged about twenty-one, became king. After further defeats he had to make peace.

The crisis came in January 878, when the Danes under Guthrum surprised the royal stronghold of Chippenham, where Alfred had spent Christmas. Much of Wessex submitted, but Alfred escaped with a small band into the Somerset marshes and built a fort at Athelney, from which he harried the enemy. The famous story of the burnt cakes belongs to these weeks, but it was first written down long after his death and is legend. In May 878 he gathered the men of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, defeated the Danes at Edington and starved them into surrender at Chippenham. Guthrum accepted baptism with Alfred as his godfather, and a later treaty drew a frontier between Alfred’s kingdom and the Danish-ruled lands of the east and north that came to be called the Danelaw.

Alfred used the peace that followed to make Wessex hard to conquer. He put his army and militia on a rota, so that a force could always take the field while other men worked their farms, and built a network of fortified towns, or burhs, placed so that no part of the kingdom lay more than about twenty miles from shelter. The document known as the Burghal Hidage records how each was to be manned. He also had ships built to his own design. In 886 he occupied London and restored it, and in the mid-880s he began to call himself King of the Anglo-Saxons. When a large Danish army crossed from the Continent in 892 or 893, it spent four years in England without breaking Wessex.

He was equally determined to restore learning, which he believed the Viking wars had nearly destroyed. In one preface he lamented that when he became king he could not think of a single man south of the Thames who could translate a letter from Latin. He learned Latin himself in his late thirties and then, working with a circle of scholars, put into English the books he thought men most needed to know. Among them was Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, a guide for bishops, which went out to every bishop in the kingdom, along with works of history and philosophy. He set up a court school where the sons of nobles and of humbler families studied in English and Latin, and he issued a law code drawn from earlier kings’ laws. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was begun in his reign.

Alfred suffered for much of his life from a painful illness that Asser describes in detail, and he died on 26 October 899, aged about fifty. He was buried at Winchester, and his remains were moved first to the New Minster and then, in 1110, to Hyde Abbey outside the city. His children by Ealhswith included Æthelflæd, who would rule Mercia as its Lady, and Edward the Elder, who succeeded him. People were calling Alfred “the Great” by the thirteenth century, and writers of the sixteenth made the name common. No other native English monarch has been given it.

Place in the family

The archive records 160 of his descendants, across 39 generations.

Images

The Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, whose Old English inscription reads “Alfred ordered me to be made” (Mkooiman, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Alfred’s will as copied into the New Minster Liber Vitae, about 1031 (British Library, Stowe MS 944) (British Library, public domain)
Statue of Alfred at Wantage, his birthplace (Philip Jelley, retouched by Pko, CC BY-SA 3.0)

One of 22 people of House of Wessex (until 1093) in this archive. Alfred’s line: kings of Wessex who became the first kings of all England.

Partners

Married Ealhswith of Mercia (852 – 902) in 868 — 2 children together

Children

Æthelflæd Lady of the Mercians (870 – 918)
King Edward The Elder (874 – 924)

Life

849 — Born
868 — Married Ealhswith of Mercia
871 — Alfred becomes King of Wessex following the death of his brother Aethelred
878 — Guthrum's Danish army invades Wessex, and Alfred takes refuge on the isle of Athelney. Alfred defeats Guthrum at the battle of Ethandune (Edington) in Wiltshire.
884 — Alfred defeats the Danes at Rochester
885 — Alfred imposes rules on South Wales
886 — Alfred takes London from the Danes. Danelaw - the territory occupied by the Danes in East Anglia is recognised by Alfred
890 — Guthrum dies. Alfred establishes a permanent army and navy
893 — Asser, Bishop of Sherborne, completes his book _The Life of Alfred the Great_
894 — Northumbrian and East Angles swear allegiance to Alfred, but promptly break the truce attacking South West England.
899 — Died
899 — Alfred dies and is buried at Winchester. His son Edward becomes king.

Sources

Alfred the Great · Wikipedia
Alfred ‘The Great’ (r. 871–899) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
Alfred (king of Wessex) · Encyclopaedia Britannica